Sunday, January 1, 2012

This Week in the Book Pages

A highlight from this week's book pages is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's review of Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, by the late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. The book will be published posthumously by Yale University Press. Here's a taste, from reviewer Peter Monaghan:

More than a study of child abuse, it excavates the psychological foundations of destructive attitudes toward children. Scholars are praising its erudition, reach, and impassioned but carefully reasoned advocacy for change.

Young-Bruehl assails the idea "that children are dangerous and burdensome and that childhood is a time when discipline is the paramount adult responsibility." She calls for an end to antichild policies and behaviors, from the monumental to the mundane—child imprisonment, inadequate school financing, tolerance of corporal punishment within families—that assume adults have "absolute" authority over children's physical, emotional, and psychological well-being.

For a gripping narrative of [the Haitian Revolution], there are few better places to turn than “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” by Laurent Dubois, a Duke University scholar of the French Caribbean. Now Dubois has brought Haiti’s story up to the present in an equally well-written new book, “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History,” which is enriched by his careful attention to what Haitian intellectuals have had to say about their country over the last two centuries.

Besides offering another take on Roger Williams (here), the Wall Street Journal covers two new biographies: Saladin (Harvard University Press), by Anne-Marie Eddé (a portrait of the famous twelfth century Muslim ruler) (here), and Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life (Yale University Press), by Joshua Rubenstein (here).